What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life?

Some years ago, I came across Po Bronson’s What Should I Do with My Life? It is a wonderful title because almost everyone has asked that question at some stage. Bronson offered no neat formula. He travelled, met people and wrote about those who changed jobs, abandoned careers, followed unlikely dreams, failed, started again and occasionally discovered what really mattered to them.

I remember liking the book. But recently I realised that its question no longer quite applied to me. I had already done quite a lot with my life.

So I went to see the Professor.

“You are looking unusually serious,” he said.

“I have been thinking.”

“That generally causes trouble.”

I ignored him. “Have you read Po Bronson’s What Should I Do with My Life? I was wondering whether somebody has written What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life?”

The Professor looked at me. “How much of it is left?”

“I don’t know.”

“Excellent. That should make planning interesting.”

I told him I had looked at some books on the second half of life—Arthur Brooks on moving from achievement towards wisdom, Marc Freedman on meaningful work later in life, Barbara Bradley Hagerty on renewal and George Vaillant on ageing well. All useful. None quite answered my question.

“These are all sensible books,” I said. “And yet I didn’t find my answer.”

“Perhaps because they were answering their questions.”

That irritated me slightly. “What is wrong with my question?”

“Nothing. Tell me exactly what you are asking.”

“I am seventy. I have been a professor, entrepreneur, policy adviser to multilateral development banks, corporate consultant, blogger, book writer and keynote speaker. Most of my professional life has been around environment and sustainability.”

The Professor nodded. “So?”

“So what should I do with the rest of it?”

“The rest of what?”

“My life.”

“I understood that part. What exactly is unfinished?”

I had not expected that. “I could write another book. Start another initiative. Teach another course. Advise more companies.”

“You could do all of that.” He looked increasingly bored. “You have spent your entire professional life adding things.”

“That is called being productive.”

“Sometimes.” He took a sip of Ethiopian coffee. “Professor, entrepreneur, adviser, consultant, writer, speaker. Impressive collection of nouns.”

“You are making fun of me.”

“A little. But that is not the point. When you were forty, What should I do next? probably meant What should I add? At seventy, perhaps the more useful question is What should I remove?”

That stopped me. We rarely think of subtraction as a strategy for life. In organisations, we launch programmes, add committees, create services and invent indicators. Very few people receive applause for stopping things. Perhaps lives develop the same institutional clutter.

“I enjoy my work,” I protested.

“I am sure you do.”

“And people still ask me for advice. I still have ideas.”

“Even better.”

“So why should I stop?”

“I didn’t say you should stop. I am asking why continuing must look like what you have already been doing.”

For most of my life, work had provided structure: a lecture to prepare, a deadline, a client’s problem. But it had also provided something subtler, evidence that I remained useful. Perhaps one anxiety of ageing is not the fear of doing nothing but the fear of no longer being needed.

“So you think I should retire?”

“Retirement is a rather crude word.”

“What would you call it?”

“Editing.” The Professor drew three circles. Doing. Enabling. Leaving Behind.

“You have spent much of your life in the first.”

“That sounds accusatory.”

“It isn’t. You solved problems, taught, advised, built organisations and wrote reports. But perhaps now the value of your experience lies less in doing everything yourself and more in increasing the capability of others.” Mentoring. Opening doors. Helping someone avoid a mistake I had already made.

“And the third circle?”

“Things that continue without you.” Institutions. Ideas. Books. Methods. People. Perhaps even stories.

There was an irony here. My professional life had been built around sustainability, intergenerational responsibility and long-term thinking. Yet applied to my own life, I seemed to favour the opposite model: maximise output, fill the calendar, accept another assignment. We speak often about sustainable organisations, much less about sustainable careers, and almost never about sustainable endings.

The Professor laughed. “Consultants eventually become their own case studies.”

Still, something bothered me. “Suppose I still want to achieve something significant.”

“Why shouldn’t you?”

“Then all this talk about mentoring and wisdom sounds a little too comfortable.”

He nodded. That was precisely the trap. There is a patronising view of later life in which ambition must quietly disappear, replaced by gardening and affectionate grandchildren. But there is nothing undignified about wanting to build something at seventy. The question is not whether ambition should end. It is whether it should mature.

Perhaps at twenty-five ambition asks: How far can I go? At forty-five: How much can I build? At seventy: What is worth building now?

That last question contains an important constraint. Time.

“At your age,” said the Professor, “time becomes less theoretical.”

At thirty, ten years feels abstract. At seventy, it has weight. There may be twenty productive years ahead, or five. The scarce resource is not money, ideas or contacts. It is mornings. How many good ones remain, and what deserves them?

The Professor then mentioned people who, late in life, had not necessarily done less. They had changed the form of their contribution. Take G. D. Agrawal”: environmental engineer, IIT professor, first Member-Secretary of the Central Pollution Control Board, who later took sannyasa as Swami Gyan Swaroop Sanand and undertook fasts demanding stronger protection of the Ganga.

“He spent one part of his life studying environmental problems professionally,” said the Professor. “In the later part, conviction consumed the professional identity.”

“That is rather more drastic than retirement.”

“Quite.”

There was Baba Amte, who moved from the institution he had built at Anandwan to live near the Narmada and join struggles around displacement. M. S. Swaminathan shifted from scientist to elder statesman, arguing for sustainable agriculture. Yvon Chouinard, in his eighties, reorganised Patagonia’s ownership so its wealth could keep supporting environmental purposes. Jane Goodall shifted from researcher to messenger, spending her later decades speaking especially to younger generations.

The Professor paused. “One man went to a river. Another turned science into stewardship. One transformed a company. Another devoted her later years to the next generation.”

“So what did they have in common?”

“None of them seems to have asked, ‘How do I remain busy?’”

“Perhaps,” he continued, “the better question is not What should I do with the rest of my life? but What can I do now that this stage of my life uniquely allows me to do?”

Then another possibility occurred to me. “What if I simply travelled? Not flying in for a conference and leaving the next morning, but staying long enough to understand the rhythm of a place, talking to people without asking them for data. Perhaps even write about it.”

The Professor smiled. “So you have converted your world tour into another sustainability project.”

“Then perhaps I should become a Rotarian.”

“Why?”

“Service. Fellowship. Doing something useful without running a company.”

“All respectable. But do you want service—or structure?”

He lighted his cigar.

“I am only asking whether you want service or structure. Some people leave one organisation and immediately search for another. Soon they are as busy as before, except nobody is paying them.”

“Or,” I said, “I could become a monk.”

This time he laughed. “Go to the Himalayas? You would last four days. On the fifth you would prepare a PowerPoint on improving the ashram’s environmental performance.” Then he became serious. Vanaprastha suggested gradual withdrawal from worldly preoccupations; sannyasa went further.

“So should I go to the mountains?”

“Perhaps. Or first discover whether you can sit quietly in Mumbai without needing to be important. You don’t need saffron robes to experiment with renunciation. Spend a month without conferences. Stop looking at how many people read your posts. Walk somewhere without turning the walk into material for a blog.”

“That last condition is unreasonable.”

“I thought you might say that” Professor smiled.

Perhaps one could borrow something from the monk without becoming one. Less status. Fewer obligations. More silence and wandering. Less anxiety about whether every day had been productive.

The Professor finally gave me four questions.

What should I stop doing?
What can I do that relatively few others can do?
Who should become better because I was here? And perhaps the hardest:
What would I still do if nobody applauded?

Would I write if only fifty people read the blog? Teach if no title was attached? These are not moral tests. They simply separate interest from identity.

As I was leaving, I returned to Po Bronson. “So what is the answer?”

The Professor shook his head. “You are still looking for a title followed by ten chapters. You have already been a professor, entrepreneur, consultant, adviser, writer and speaker. Why assume you now need another noun?”

That stayed with me. Perhaps the rest of life is not about choosing between working, travelling, serving or becoming a monk, but combining them differently. Doing fewer things, but choosing them more deliberately. Working where experience has leverage. Helping people who will continue beyond us. Travelling not merely to arrive. Serving without collecting titles. Writing what still needs to be said. And leaving some space unoccupied.

As I stepped outside, the Professor called after me. “One more thing. Don’t spend too much of the rest of your life deciding what to do with the rest of your life.”

That, I thought, was probably the most useful advice of the afternoon.

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